The Black Minutes (12 page)

Cabrera’s head went right through the window, breaking it into a million pieces. Of the chaos that followed, he only remembered leaning out the window of the car and repeatedly reading the words on the side mirror:
OBJECTS ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR
.

As he asked himself who he was and why he was there, he saw the pickup pulling into reverse again, this time all the way back to the end of the block; he was going to ram right into him again.

Cabrera couldn’t move. For a second, he was under the impression that there was an argument going on in his head, but then he looked in the rearview mirror and saw that no, he wasn’t the one arguing, it was two girls sitting in the backseat: a dark-skinned girl and a redhead. The first girl, the
morena
, was saying, Here comes the pickup, we gotta move. The redhead was really distracted, or maybe just in shock like he was because of the accident: Move? Why should we move? We’re fine right here! Meanwhile, Cabrera watched the pickup coming closer and heard a Rigo Tovar song on the radio:
Oh! It’s so good to see you again! / To say hello and know you’re happy. / Oh! It’s so good to see you again. / So pretty, so beautiful, and so happy
. When he asked himself why he could hear it so clearly, he realized it was none other than Rigo Tovar himself in the backseat. The best singer of
música tropical
on the planet was there, right next to the girls, behind the driver’s seat! Rigo, who was wearing a white suit and dark glasses, was playing the guiro with a lot of feeling. Cabrera smiled at him: Man, what a huge honor, Rigo Tovar in my car. Rigo sang:
That day when you left / I found myself alone and sad in the park / trying to figure out a reason / why you were so angry
.

The only thing was, the pickup was still moving toward them, and the
morena
mentioned an important fact:
It’s getting closer; it’s dangerous
. And the redhead said,
Dangerous? Why dangerous?
The redhead was not known for her intelligence. Suddenly, Rigo leaned forward and said in a haughty tone of voice:
You know what, my friend? I think you need to move your car; otherwise they’re going to run into you and you won’t be able to sit in the park under the flamboyants and the rose bushes, you won’t see the social service girls or be able to dance to my songs, and I’ll feel sad
. No, not that, Rigo couldn’t be sad.
Don’t worry
, Cabrera said to him,
I promise I’m going to move the car
, and the musician smiled condescendingly.
No problem, Rigo, it’s an
honor to be here talking to you
, and Rigo laughed, and suddenly he and the girls had vanished into thin air.

Then it was just Cabrera and the pickup left. Not quite conscious of what he was doing, his hand shifted into reverse and his foot found the accelerator; his car jerked backward with a loud screech. The pickup grazed the bumper, just barely touching him and jumped over the median. Unfortunately, at that same moment a double tractor trailer was headed down the other side of the road. It dragged the pickup almost a thousand feet and then rolled up on top of it. That’s why I don’t run stop signs, he said to himself. You never know when there’ll be trouble.

The last thing he remembers is his car hitting the sidewalk behind him and coming to a halt. Then he turned off the engine, got out of the car, and passed out. The rest is what’s expected: ambulance, fractured arm, broken ribs, concussion.

There are two kinds of police officers in the world: those who like their job and those who don’t. I liked my job, Agent Chávez liked his job, and of course Chief García liked to investigate and solve a case, but his best detective did not—and he was the one who received the crime report first. He tried to pass it on to somebody else, like a hot potato, but there are leads that get under your skin and don’t leave you in peace until you follow up on them. They say that a kind of obsession takes over, like a dog dreaming about the scent of his prey, even when the hunt is over.

Well, I have to start somewhere. On March 17, 1977, Vicente Rangel González, nearly thirty, a native of the port who lived in a house by the river, a musician turned detective, was the one in charge of following up on the crime report. Rangel had spent six years on the force, the last four trying to resign. He was always saying he was going to resign, but every time he was on the verge of doing so he got involved in some difficult case and ended up putting it off again.

The day it all began, El Chicote—receptionist, guard, car washer, and errand boy for the entire department—passed him the call. “It’s for you.”

“My uncle?”

“No, what do you think? It’s somebody reporting a crime.”

That bit about the uncle was something of a joke between them, if you could say that Vicente Rangel liked jokes. . . . He didn’t, really.

He picked up the heavy black telephone in the middle of the office. On the other end of the line, an exasperated voice was shouting. “Hello? Hello? Hello?”

“Headquarters.”

“Finally! This is Licenciado Rivas at the Bar León. We found another girl, like the one in El Palmar.”

“One moment,” he said, and covered the mouthpiece with his hand. “Where’s El Travolta?” he asked El Chicote.

“He hasn’t come in.”

“Why’d you transfer the call to me?”

“Lolita told me to.”

Two desks away, Lolita was chewing her nails. She was the chief’s secretary.

“Hey, Lolita. What’s going on? This case belongs to El Travolta.”

“But he’s not here, you know he’s always late. Why don’t you go?”

“Is it an order?”

“Well . . . yes. No? Which would you prefer?”

Rangel let out a huge sigh and filled his lungs with the hot, heavy, unbreathable air; then he uncovered the mouthpiece and said, with as much authority as possible, “Are you the manager?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t touch anything and don’t let anybody leave. They’ll be right over.”

“Do you know where it is?”

“Sure, man, they’re on their way.”

Everyone knew where the Bar León was: in front of the central plaza. It was one of the oldest bars in the port, as old as the
second founding of the city at the end of the nineteenth century. Although its golden age was past—sometime in the thirties, just before the Second World War—its air of a grand bar fallen on hard times still attracted tourists and, above all, a sparse but loyal clientele of neighbors and government office employees who worked nearby.

Rangel noted the time: a quarter past two, and let it be on the record that I didn’t want to go, he told himself. As he hung up the phone, Rangel had to admit he felt nervous. Could it be the same guy? he wondered. He felt like the palms of his hands were on fire again and he told himself: Motherfucker, I bet it is. He thought of applying the medicinal ointment prescribed by Dr. Rodríguez, but he wasn’t sure. He didn’t want anyone to see him using it; ointments and makeup seemed like fag stuff to him, nothing to do with a tough cop about to turn thirty, but it was true that Dr. Rodríguez Caballero was the best specialist in the state. OK, he told himself, what’s the harm in using just a little bit? He was opening the box, he’d already pulled out the ointment and was about to rub some onto his left hand, when he realized that he was being watched by a guy in a plaid shirt wearing thick coke-bottle glasses, a lowly type but very clean, who was waiting in a chair by the entrance to the corridor, maybe just another aspiring
madrina
, like so many others who turned up there. They all wanted to be lackeys, gofers for the police officers. Annoyed, the detective put the ointment away in his pocket.

Vicente Rangel González pulled out the twenty-two caliber pistol he’d paid for in ten installments, undid his belt, and put on the holster. He preferred the twenty-two caliber to the heavy regulation forty-five caliber the department offered. As it was a small city, there weren’t enough firearms for everybody, and the few they had were kept in Chief García’s office, under double lock
in a case, but the chief wasn’t there and he had the key. Rangel didn’t like to carry a weapon and was sure he wouldn’t need it, but he took it anyway; don’t want that guy to find me first. When he’d closed the holster he conveniently and discreetly scratched himself, and when the itch had diminished he turned to El Chicote.

“Tell the forensic guys, and send me Cruz Treviño, or Crazyshot and Fatwolf. Tell them to do a complete search of the plaza and the docks.”

“What? Can you say that again?”

Rangel would have liked to give an explanation, but he couldn’t discard the possibility that the man in the plaid shirt was a newspaper spy, and so he made a gesture that said
Don’t ask
and went out of the room.

El Chicote silently obeyed. Experience had taught him not to argue with nervous policemen, so he picked up the yellow pages, looked up the Lonchería Las Lupitas, and set to work trying to track down Crazyshot.

Rangel crossed the gravel parking lot, trailing a dusty wake that accompanied him to the car. As he’d feared, the metal was broiling: waves of heat rose from the hood. Fuck, he said. If only he had air-conditioning. He stuck the key into the red-hot lock, rolled the window down, flipped the driver’s seat cushion over, and got in. Before he could reach across to lower the right-side window, he was already sweating, rivers flowing down his face. I surrender, he thought. Turning on the car he burned his fingers again, so he pulled out a handkerchief and a red bandanna from the glove compartment, draped one over the steering wheel, covered the stick shift with the other, and drove in the direction of the bar. Back then the department only had three vehicles: La Julia—a covered pickup, adapted for transporting “suspects”—and two patrol cars painted in the official colors; one was used by Chief García and the other was driven
by El Travolta, otherwise known as Joaquín Taboada, García’s second in command. All the other agents had to use their own cars if they had them, as was the case with Vicente Rangel.

He looked at the thermometer. One hundred and three degrees, and it wasn’t going to get any cooler. Since buying the Chevy Nova he’d tried to avoid driving at the hottest hours, during the port’s interminable midday, when the buildings seemed to be boiling, and hazy mirages rose from the pavement.

Today he had the impression he was entering another reality, the epicenter of fear. To distract himself from such macabre thoughts, he turned on the radio, where the announcer was suggesting it was the Martians overheating the earth: “First they’re gonna finish off the ozone layer and deforest the planet, and then they’re gonna melt the ice cap at the North Pole and flood the cities. Their plan is to mercilessly extinguish the human race.” Fucking Martians, he thought, they must be
putos
.

As he passed the Tiberius Bar he slowed down to see if El Travolta was there, but no luck. Fucking fat ass, he thought, and to top it all off he’s going be mad at me.

He took the Boulevard del Puerto to Avenida del Palmar and only had to stop for the light at the Texas Curve, and since there was a tractor trailer in front of him and he had no siren, he had no way of making himself heard. OK, he told himself, I can wait a second. Honestly, he didn’t want to take on this job and he still held out hope that El Chicote would find El Travolta and he’d be relieved of the investigation. Thirty seconds later he felt sure it wouldn’t happen that way, at least not right away. There was no way out of this situation. Who cares? he thought. Let the fat ass get mad, so what. One more stripe on the tiger.

He looked at the enormous billboard for Cola Drinks, with a woman picking up a glass of petroleum-colored liquid
overflowing with ice. While he waited for the light to change, like the good anti-imperialist he was, he thought mean things about the company and even about the model in the ad. Fucking gringo assholes and fucking bitch in hot pants, she must be a big whore. Every time he saw a cola drink he associated it with the war in Vietnam, the tension in the Middle East, the Cold War, the fall of Salvador Allende in Chile. Since he’d joined the police force, these explosions of overt rancor had become less frequent, but they persisted. His internationalist conscience wouldn’t die. But there had to be some explanation for that stuff about the girl found dead.

He reached the Bar León in ten minutes—back then, you could traverse the whole city in half an hour—and as he approached, he recognized Dr. Ridaura’s car, which meant Ramírez would be there, too. In the mornings they gave classes in chemistry and biology at the Jesuits’ school; in the afternoons, or in case of an emergency, they were the only forensics specialists in the city.

Strangely, the forensic expert, Ramírez, was waiting for him in the street. He looked seasick and his eyes were red. This guy can’t take anything, Rangel thought. Looks like whatever he saw made an impression on him.

“Finished?”

“Getting some air.”

“Hurry up, because the ambulance is coming,” he ordered, and added, as a large group of curious onlookers was forming, “Open a space in front of the door. Don’t let anyone in or out.”

Before he could take another step, Ramírez confessed. “Mr. Rangel?”

“Yes?”

“The manager let one individual leave.”

Rangel nodded. “An individual? The manager? I’m going to see that asshole right now. Fuck him for obstruction of justice.”